In the popular wisdom of the Middle East "The enemy of my enemy is my
friend!" This was the principle on which was forged our alliance with
the Soviet Union during World War II, in a common determination to
defeat and destroy Hitler's Third Reich. With abundant documentation an
impressive new book suggests that a similar collaboration is taking
place today behind the scenes, with fanatical Muslims and the hard-core
radical American Left bonding in their hatred of the United States and
in their zeal to replace our republic's present form with something
else. And while fanatical Muslims and the extreme American Left are by
no means agreed as to what that "something else" ought to be, even as
the U. S.A. and the U. S. S. R. had very different blueprints for the
kind of world they hoped would emerge after the war, the immediate
challenge of how to bring down a powerful enemy in command of
formidable resources can readily trump all disputations about the shape
of things in more distant days to come.

The book to which I refer is called The
Grand Jihad.- How Islam and the Left Sabotage America. Its
author is Andrew C. McCarthy, the former federal prosecutor whose
skillful conduct of the goveniment's case consigned permanently to "the
stammer" the infamous "Blind Sheikh" who organized the first attack on
the World Trade Center, the truck bomb attack in 1993.

Mr. McCarthy's prose flows easily, and he knows how to build a case.
Faced with pastoral preoccupations, I'm just a quarter of the way
through the book's four hundred pages (including sixty pages of
end-note documentation). But I've already read enough to conclude that
I would very much prefer not to be the
defendant in any trial in which Mr. McCarthy would be leading the
prosecution, though no doubt someone will come forward at some point to
rebut the claims advanced in The Grand Jihad.Whether
with or without success remains to be seen.

On this Fourth of July weekend, as we give thanks to God for the
precious blessings of liberty, blessings secured through the blood,
sweat and tears of earlier generations, let us recommit ourselves
prayerfully to do all that we can to safeguard our freedom against
those who would subvert it.

Clothed in the mantle of a Paul Revere, Andrew McCarthy has sounded an
alarm about what he perceives to be a major threat to our republic.
Would it be prudent to dismiss his concern out of hand?

In the National Review for
June 21st David Pryce-Jones offered his evaluation of The Grand Jihad. May I share it
with you here.

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The Grand
Jihad. How Islam and the Left Sabotage America
By Andrew McCarthy

The very
notion of a Muslim America might seem preposterous, downright
laughable, but there are people and forces identifiably working towards
that end. "Islamism" is the term that describes the growing global
movement of Muslims for whom the supremacy of their faith justifies
every kind of deception and violence. Islamism as we experience it
today began in Egypt between the world wars, with the movement known as
the Muslim Brotherhood. Over the years, the Brothers have been
phenomenally successful, establishing themselves in one form or another
in at least 60 countries. In 1991 the Brotherhood's top
leader in America wrote a memorandum for the Brothers to make them
understand their present purposes-and, in so doing, provided the
title of this book. They were engaged, he
explained, on "a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the
Western civilization FROM WITHIN and 'sabotaging' its miserable house
by their hands and the hands of believers so that it is eliminated and
God's religion is made victorious over all other religions."
Had he known that the FBI would obtain this document, he might have
been more guarded. Yet
today's foremost spokesman for the Muslim Brotherhood, Sheikh Yusuf
al-Qaradawi, boasts in much the same manner. "We will conquer Europe,
we will conquer America, not through the sword but through Dawa [the
Arabic for proselytizing, or outreach.].

People in
public positions--George W. Bush, for instance, Tony Blair, and
pretty well all other European politicians-like to maintain that
Islam is a religion of peace, and consequently it has become
politically correct, indeed mandatory to say that Islamism is a
deformity, nothing whatever to do with the faith. Andrew C. McCarthy has
the independence of mind to suggest that the doctrines of the faith and
the savagery of Muslims are directly related or, as McCarthy defines
it, they form a "nexus." Plentiful incitements to violence and war
against non-Muslims are to be found in the Koran to substantiate the
point.

Islamism means jihad, and jihad means the
imposition of sharia, or Islamic law as laid down in a doctrinal
and theological form that cannot be
challenged, and that means a Muslim society and Muslim supremacy for
ever and ever, amen. Sharia, as McCarthy puts it, "establishes a state
of religion, rejects the freedom of citizens to govern themselves
irrespective of a religious code, proscribes freedom of conscience,
nullifies economic freedom, destroys the principle of equality under
the law, subjugates non-Muslims in the humiliation of dhimmitude
[officially recognized subordinate status], and calls for the
execution of homosexuals and apostates"-all of which is
"antithetical to bedrock American principles."

McCarthy has a serious case to make, even if the material has its
sensational side. He
was plunged into a study of Islamism as the federal prosecutor in the
case of the Blind Sheikh responsible for the 1993 terror attack on the
World Trade Center. That outrage was widely dismissed as an aberration,
an isolated phenomenon, the act of a few deranged criminals. That
was both ignorant and condescending. 9/11 and subsequent
attacks provide the contrary evidence of a SUSTAINED international
campaign planned and waged by purposeful and capable men. It is
their belief that Muslims everywhere are suffering from injustices
inflicted upon them through no fault of their own. Bad Muslims and
wicked non-Muslims are held responsible for everything that has gone
wrong in the Islamic world, and good Muslims are
obligated to resort to jihad to put this right, sacrificing their lives
if they have to.

A plethora
of organizations is at work in the United States implanting Islamism
with all the overt and covert means at their disposal. The first step
has been to arrange for some sort of social separation from the native
non-Muslims, or what McCarthy calls "voluntary apartheid".
He duly unpacks the. complicated genealogy of the organizations set up
for this purpose: the World Assembly of Muslim Youth, the Muslim
Students Association, the Islamic Assembly of North America, the North
American Islamic Trust, the Muslim American Society, the Council on
American-Islamic Relations [CAIR]- and others besides, all more or less
DERIVATIVES OF THE ORIGINAL MODEL of the Muslim Brotherhood. In
opposition to American law, bogus charities surreptitiously funnel
money to such causes as al-Qaeda and the Palestinian Islamists of
Hamus. CAIR is an especially subversive organization, masquerading as a
civil-rights lobby but prominently and consistently defending indicted
terrorists, including Osama bin Laden. One of its officials
called the 1998
bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania the unfortunate
result of "misunderstandings on both sides." Other CAIR figures
have been convicted of federal felonies, including terrorism, illegal
financial transactions, and recruiting jihadists; and some have been
deported for their offenses.

The
diversity of these bodies reflects the careerist capabilities of
those coming to the top of them, and it is more apparent
than real because, in general terms, they
are front organizations for Saudi Arabia, whose foreign and domestic
policies they exist to promote. According to McCarthy, Saudi Arabia has
spent in the United States alone $100 BILLION [of its oil riches] and
probably more on its policy of "sabotaging," which includes funding
mosques like the Dar at-Hijrah in northern Virginia, where the Islamist
preacher Anwar al-Awlaki prepared Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan to kill and
wound his army colleagues at Fort Hood. (Awlaki fled to Yemen
to avoid investigation, but remained in touch by e-mail) The one genuine
dispute between these bodies and their representatives concerns the
IMPLEMENTATION of terror. Some believe that terror is an INDISPENSABLE
weapon that must so undermine the will of Americans that they will
collapse, sue for peace, and convert to Islam. The more cold-blooded
argue that terror is certainly a VITAL tool in the long term, but 9/11
proves that it risks provoking Americans to defend themselves with
superior violence, as in Afghanistan and Iraq, and therefore FOR THE
TIME BEING its use is PREMATURE.

Granted
their view of the irremediable malice of infidels and Westerners
especially, Islamists are behaving predictably, you might even say
naturally. They want a clash of civilizations, and they shall have it.
Much more extraordinary, much more damaging, is the support given BY
THE LEFT to Islamism. In McCarthy's judgment, these partners may took
improbable but actually they are two of a kind. "The essentials of
their vision COALESCE. They are totalitarian, collectivist, and
antithetical to ... individual liberty." Elsewhere he rephrases
this analysis: "With
their collectivist philosophy, transnational outlook, totalitarian
demands, and revolutionary designs, Islamists are natural allies of the
radical Left. That doesn't mean the
alliance is naturally enduring," but
only that free-market
capitalism and the liberty of the individual are enemies they have in
common.

What is
apparent here is an intellectual failure current throughout the West.
Due to some inferiority complex or other psychological disorders, many
Westerners [especially college and university faculty members] have
internalized the negative view that Islamists have of them and feet
themselves to be guilty as charged, capitalists, exploiters, racists,
and what have you. Third World sadism perpetuates First World masochism
in a vicious cycle. Ranks of professors and Islamist apologists line up
with the likes of Noam Chomsky, Edward Said, Rashid Khalidi, John
Esposito, and Juan Cole ... [along with other exponents of] "a Leftism
of the most insidious kind, secular and uncompromising in its rejection
of bourgeois values, but feverishly spiritual in its zeal to tear down
the existing order....[including such figures as] Saul Alinsky, the
community organizer.-the [poet and] Communist-party member Frank
Marshall Davis ... and the race-obsessed and anti-American Jeremiah
Wright, in whose Chicago church Barak Obama worshipped for some 20
years....[President Obama's] speech in Cairo in the summer of 2009
was to mark a new beginning in the relationship of the United States to
the Muslim world. That
speech was co-hosted by Al-Azhar University, at which the Blind Sheikh
and Sheikh Qaradawi had studied, and selected members of the Muslim
Brotherhood were in the audience. They may have been as surprised as
everyone else to hear in that speech that Islam had ALWAYS been a part
of America's history.

All around
him McCarthy sees evidence of appeasement and surrender in response to
the example set at the top....An Orwellian order comes that language
has to be controlled, and terms like "jihad" and "Islamofascism
"purged. The expression "War on Terror" is now bowdlerized to "Overseas
Contingency Operation against Man-Caused Disasters," and
officials have to keep a straight face when they utter this complete
travesty of reality. Major Stephen Coughlin,
an expert in Islamic jurisprudence, was ousted from the Pentagon-at the
behest of someone of Egyptian origins and dubious credentials-for a
scholarly brief he had written. The incident when Obama bowed low to
the Islamist bigot-in-chief, the king of Saudi Arabia [and Supreme
Guardian of the Sacred Sites of Mecca and Medina] seems to McCarthy the
perfect symbol of national abasement and a promise of worse to come.

Everyone
must hope that Muslims will assimilate wherever they have immigrated, and
that the Grand Jihad will fade away as fantasies do. In that event,
this polemic will seem a curiosity, a state-of-the-nation pessimism at
a time when things were in flux.... But should the opposite
occur, and the Grand Jihad make further inroads, then this will prove
to have been a furious and prescient warning.